Eucalyptus offers an open source cloud software platform for on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that allows enterprises to create private and hybrid clouds. The Eucalyptus Cloud Test Lab provides enterprises with a secure, fully functional hosted IaaS cloud to validate their cloud application migration strategies prior to implementation. Customers can purchase the exact cloud environment used during the testing phase.

“By validating the technical and business benefits of specific use cases prior to migration, enterprises can deploy hosted private and hybrid clouds with a new level of confidence,” said David Butler, SVP of Marketing at Eucalyptus. “As part of Cloud Test Lab, customers can leverage the Eucalyptus partner ecosystem to evaluate a complete cloud solution, and benefit from a customer-focused, best-of-breed systems management approach.”

“CoreSite is pleased to provide the data center infrastructure to support Eucalyptus’ new Cloud Test Lab offering,” said Brian Warren, VP of Product Management at CoreSite. “This offering provides our enterprise data center customers with a secure, risk-managed testing environment for their cloud migration strategies. The Eucalyptus Cloud Test Lab demonstrates CoreSite’s commitment to developing Cloud computing ecosystems for our customers.”

Eucalyptus’ Cloud Test Lab will operate on innovative Dell infrastructure provided by Dasher Technologies. The official product launch date is set for March 1.

CoreSite Realty (COR) is a national provider of data centers and interconnection services. The company houses 700 customers on infrastructure including more than two million square feet of space across 12 data centers in seven key U.S. markets.

ABB to embed nlyte DCIM.  nlyte software and ABB announced that ABB will embed nlyte Software’s Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) suite as part of the ABB Decathlon Data Center Enterprise Management (DCEM) product offering. Together the nlyte DCIM suite and ABB’s DCEM will present a unique combination of intelligent capacity planning for the optimal placement of data center assets and business process automation that improves availability and operational excellence. “ABB is taking the approach of integrating best-in-class software by combining their real time power and control with nlyte Software’s move/add/change management and what-if capacity planning,” said Andy Lawrence, research director at The 451 Group.  “Together they deliver a full set of capabilities for enterprise-class data center management.”

IO selected by BTI Communications.  IO announced today that it has been awarded a contract with BTI Communications Group, Ltd., a leader in providing on premise and private cloud based managed voice and data communications systems for multi-site businesses. Delivered in the IO Phoenix facility BTI will receive IO’s Data Center as a Service through its modular data center technology platform IO Anywhere. ”IO’s modular data center increases our hosting and managed services capability and provides us flexible expansion of our private cloud services. IO has saved us time to market and costs which helps us to help our customers save money,” said Scott Staver, COO, BTI Communications. “Leveraging the modular IO platform has provided us flexibility and the ability to customize according to our customers’ unique needs.”

Kleiner Perkins considering Cloud startup fund.  Bloomberg reports that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is considering starting a new fund focused on startups selling cloud services to corporations. Kleiner Perkins has backed such companies as Zynga (ZNGA) and Groupon, and could invest $100 million in the market this year.  Companies’ comfort level and willingness to adopt the cloud is hitting an acceleration point,” said Matt Murphy, a partner in the Menlo Park, California-based firm. “Now’s the most interesting time in the last 10 years to be investing in enterprise-based companies.”

As senior vice president of cloud services and strategy, Weinman will direct the Telx cloud services team in developing innovative new cloud architectures, products and services for enterprise and service provider customers within Telx’s C3 Cloud Connection Centers.

Weinman is a frequent keynote speaker, blogger and the founder of Cloudonomics — a rigorous, multidisciplinary approach to valuing the cloud. Prior to joining Telx, Weinman held executive leadership positions at Hewlett Packard, AT&T and Bell Laboratories.

Sterbenz will drive all facets of corporate and solutions marketing, including brand development, partnership strategies, public relations and strategic business development. He brings more than 15 years of industry experience in global marketing strategy and execution to his new position.

At Equinix, Sterbenz was responsible for building and executing the segment strategy for two of its largest verticals, Cloud & Managed Service Providers and Enterprise & Alliances. Prior to its acquisition by Equinix, Sterbenz built and executed the marketing strategy of Switch & Data’s financial services practice. Before Switch and Data, Sterbenz developed new industry leading financial products and market data solutions as Savvis’s director of financial product management. He holds an MBA, as well as bachelor degrees in finance from California State University and has served in both the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army as a Deep Sea Diver.

Oracle acquires Taleo. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation (TLEO), a leading provider of cloud-based talent management for $46.00 per share or approximately $1.9 billion. Taleo’s Talent Management Cloud helps organizations attract, develop, motivate and retain workers to improve performance and drive growth. The acquisition keeps Oracle on track for moving applications to the cloud, and continues to intensify their competition with rival SAP. In the last half of 2011 Oracle made another large purchase in the web based customer service sector withe the $1.43 billion acquisition of RightNow Technologies.  “Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Freescale targets the data center with embedded multicore processors. Freescale Semiconductor (FSL) is taking aim at cloud computing and the data center market with the announcement of its T4240 and T4160 embedded multicore processors from its QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series. The T4240 processor has achieved the highest CoreMark benchmark performance-per-watt profile and overall performance score ever recorded for an embedded processor. The new T4160 features 16 virtual cores and has achieved 1.8GHz within a 25 watt power envelope. Both processors deliver a combination of hardware acceleration, fabric-based interconnect technology, high speed I/O, hardware-assisted virtualization and next-generation 64-bit Power Architecture cores for applications in the data center, as well as other networking and industrial segments. “Data center technology is evolving at remarkable speed, and many of our customers are rapidly adding bandwidth while battling latency by flattening the data center network,” said Brett Butler, vice president of Freescale’s Networking Processor Division. “Interestingly, the data center of the future is beginning to mirror the architecture of our embedded SoCs, driven by the same requirement to deliver the highest network and content processing performance at the lowest cost of ownership. The technology demands associated with this trend are Freescale’s traditional communications processing strengths.”

Juniper introduces Universal Access Solution.  Juniper Networks (JNPR) introduced its Universal Access solution that is designed to support more mobile calls and transactions with fewer dropped calls, while also improving network utilization and revenue opportunities for service providers. The new solution enables service providers to converge wired and wireless network access to deliver a superior subscriber experience while lowering the total cost of operating, maintaining and updating the network infrastructure. ”It is clear from our recent research that Ethernet and MPLS are favored by mobile operators as primary cell site backhaul connection protocols, said Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst, Infonetics Research.  ”This means that the new Juniper ACX Series with support for both Ethernet access/aggregation and MPLS should be appealing to operators. I’m sure many operators will want to evaluate the ACX Series’ option of seamless MPLS for simplifying core through access operations, as well as the integrated timing/synchronization manager, and the new network management/analysis tools based on Junos Space.”

Missouri – The Missouri House of Representatives Wednesday gave preliminary approval to a piece of an economic development bill that failed last summer and in 2010. On a voice vote, the House adopted a bill that would grant state and local tax exemptions on items related to data storage centers and server farm facilities. The tax breaks would apply to all utilities used by the centers as well as the cost of building or retrofitting facilities. From Missouri News Horizon.

Nebraska – State lawmakers wasted no time Thursday in advancing a bill to lure a billion-dollar data center to the state. State Sen. Abbie Cornett of Bellevue, the sponsor of the data-center incentive proposal, said a second large project is now eyeing the state, as well.
“I believe this bill is absolutely essential to building Nebraska and providing good-paying, high-tech jobs for the state,” Cornett said. Nebraska is battling with Iowa for a data center known only as “Project Edge” that would cost more than a billion dollars to build. It’s thought to be the largest new business prospect, in terms of dollars, in state history. From Omaha.com.

For more information, see our Cisco Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive, the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager.  VMware (VMW) introduced VMware vCloud Integration Manager, a new solution designed to help service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director-based clouds. The new software enables service providers to easily create and deploy cloud service offerings in a repeatable and cost-effective manner. vCloud Integration Manager will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a provider’s back office system such as CRM or billing. It will also include web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. ”Service providers are looking to get high-margin cloud services to market as quickly as possible,” said Mathew Lodge, senior director of cloud services, VMware. “Until now that involved wrangling manual processes, diverting scarce development resources onto writing glue code and portals, or choosing to implement complex and expensive third-party systems. With VMware vCloud Integration Manager, providers of VMware vCloud services will have the tools they need to automatically provision services, enable reseller partners and speed customer on-boarding.” VMware vCloud Integration Manager is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012 and will be priced on a usage-based subscription model familiar to vCloud Service Providers.

Hostway introduces FlexLink for Hybrid clouds. Hostway Corporation announced the expansion of its portfolio of enterprise hosting solutions with FlexLink to enable hybrid cloud deployments.  The new hybrid solutions allow for managed hosting or colocation services to be combined with a managed public cloud infrastructure – Hostway’s FlexCloud. Hostway’s FlexLink creates a Microsoft Hyper-V based hybrid cloud available in the hosting marketplace. ”The market is clearly moving to a hybrid compute model, with analysts predicting that most cloud adoptions in the future will consist of combined private/public cloud configurations,” said John Martis, President, at Hostway. “Our FlexLink solution addresses this need with the ability to blend both our FlexCloud solution and managed server resources in any combination to build a secure, flexible and dynamically scalable infrastructure.”

HP Tests Apps in the cloud.  HP (HPQ) launched a new offering that allows partners to provide a branded solution for application performance testing in the cloud, helping their customers to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver high-quality applications. Qualified partners can use HP’s new LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud offering to deliver consumption-based performance testing of Web 2.0, AJAX, mobile and other applications to their customers. When combined with a partner’s cloud infrastructure the new offering will enable customers to simplify performance testing of complex applications, gain a comprehensive view of system performance, and accelerate time-to-market with access to the resources required to conduct application performance testing anytime, anywhere. “Organizations that do not have robust performance testing may face application delivery delays or risk performance bottlenecks if they are unable to get timely access to testing resources,” said Matthew Morgan, senior director, Product and Solution Marketing, Software, HP. “The HP LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud offering allows partners to deliver cost-effective, on-demand access to leading performance testing in the cloud.”

Built on the former Gluster technology (acquired by Red Hat this fall) the offering allows organizations to extend their data center storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

Red Hat also recently released its Storage Software Appliance. The two products will offer greater flexibility to organizations looking to include file storage in their on-premise and cloud strategies.

Works Across Multiple AWS Zones

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions. Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX compliant meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud, according to Red Hat.

Key benefits of Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS include:

• Deploy in minutes – Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS can be deployed in minutes, providing one of the fastest ways to create an on-demand, high-performance, petabyte-scale storage environment;
• Improved Amazon EC2 experience – each Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance pools multiple EBS storage elements together, moving beyond capacity limitations of a single device and smoothing performance variations across the pool. With Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance, Amazon EC2 customers experience greater availability, performance and utility pricing;
• No application rewrites – because Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX- compliant, there is no need to rewrite applications when moving data to the cloud as with cloud-based object storage; and,
• Extend your data center – Using the Red Hat Virtual Appliance along with the Red Hat Storage Software Appliance enables you to easily extend the unstructured data storage in your data center to the cloud. You can use storage as a large pool or resource and replicate to and from the cloud to meet your growing storage needs and to handle overflow situations.

For more information about Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services, visit the Red Hat web site.

Appcore delivers Infrastructure-as-a-Service technology to telcos, data centers, fiber rings, and enterprises to enable Public (service provider) and Private (enterprise) Cloud environments. The company’s Appcore Onsite product provides an integrated stack of hardware and software systems designed to be “roll-in ready” for deployment in data centers, accelerating customers’ ability to build cloud environments.

“The partnership between Appcore and Telx is an important strategic alliance for enterprise and service providers wanting to deliver the benefits of private cloud to their customers,” said Appcore CEO Brian Donaghy. “Telx is a world-class data center operator ideal for the Appcore Onsite Private Cloud solution. Through this alliance, we are able to bring a customer’s branded, private, dedicated cloud service online in 30 days or less with gold global support, enabling them to reap the rewards of cloud computing without the headaches of building it themselves.”

Through the alliance, Appcore is able to leverage Telx’s national footprint to deliver solutions rapidly into new markets.

“Telx is proud to add Appcore as a strategic partner to our rapidly expanding Cloud Xchange community of value-added cloud service providers,” said Eric Shepcaro, CEO of Telx. “With Appcore’s Onsite Private Cloud solution, customers can accelerate turnkey cloud deployments, achieve rapid time to value and leverage our purpose-built community that delivers the on-demand services, highly available networking and security solutions they require.

“Our C3 Cloud Connection Centers offer the proximity, low latency and flexibility required to optimize Appcore’s innovative mix of private hosted cloud services, securely and cost-effectively,” Shepcaro added.

Telx is a privately held company that operates 17 data center facilities – five in the New York Metro area, two in Chicago, two in Dallas, four in California, (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and two in Santa Clara) and facilities in Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C.

enStratus releases new version of cloud management solution. enStratus announced the latest release of its cloud management solution that extends its leadership in enterprise cloud management. This new release includes a new configuration management user interface, support for leading configuration management systems and extended on-premises capabilities. New features in the release include tighter integration with open source projects Chef and Puppet, a new configuration management user interface, and drag and drop configuration management. ”In comparison to our competitor’s proprietary configuration management systems, enStratus has always supported a variety of configuration management options, including both native Chef and Puppet,” said James Urquhart, VP of Product Strategy. ”With this release, we build upon that support with new capabilities aimed at making it even easier for enterprises to choose which configuration management tools are right for them. This approach, as well as expanded on-premises deployment options, will enable enterprises to better meet their cloud management needs across their private and public clouds.”

CA releases new Erwin products.  CA Technologies (CA) announced new CA ERwin products and releases that help a wider audience of stakeholders accurately visualize data assets across the enterprise, from on-premise platforms to the cloud.  The new CA Erwin Data Modeler for SQL Azure manages and integrates Microsoft SQL cloud database environments. CA Erwin Web Portal gives full visibility into the metadata that describes the business context of data assets. CA Erwin Data Modeler r8.2 facilitates collaboration across the enterprise with new concurrent licensing and Active Model template functionality. “IT is under relentless pressure to rapidly deliver new business services across an ever-changing landscape of old and new platforms,” said Mike Crest, general manager, Data Management, CA Technologies.  “By providing essential data management capabilities to the full range of users who need them, CA ERwin empowers IT to meet its escalating challenges with a new level of control, reliability and efficiency.”

Interxion welcomes European Cloud Partnership. Interxion (INXN) announced that it welcomes and supports the invitation from Neelie Kroes at the World Economic Forum in Davos to create a European Cloud Partnership. Accomplished in a collaboration among cloud providers the first phase is to establish common requirements, the second, to build and deliver Proof of Concepts, and the third, to build reference implementations. With cloud hubs in 11 countries and 13 cities, Interxion facilitates the exchange of information between cloud environments. “There is a need for the European industry to start working together proactively and to make it easier for enterprises to benefit from cloud services.  The cloud provides an important opportunity to increase the efficiency of IT resources and lower their cost. Due to the fragmentation of the European market, the transition to cloud-based service and consumption models may be slower in Europe compared to other world economies. We see this initiative from the European Commission as a positive stimulation to the industry to speed up the IT transition process” says Kevin Dean, Chief Marketing Officer, Interxion. Interxion published its Cloud Survey 2011 last year, explaining how  decision-makers and influencers view cloud computing.